Garage Floors in Cary, NC

A garage floor lives a harder life than most residential slabs. Cars roll in wet from a Piedmont thunderstorm, snow tires drag chloride in every winter, motor oil finds every hairline crack, and half the floor sits under the weight of a full-size truck ninety percent of the time. When a garage floor starts cracking across a bay, sinking at the door threshold, or lifting a corner near a support column, an overlay or a coating won't hold. What holds is the right slab thickness on a compacted base with a moisture barrier under it and a slope that moves water toward the door instead of ponding at the back wall.

Local Concrete Contractor pours new garage floors and replaces failed ones across North Carolina — attached garages, detached garages, garage additions, and floors going into existing pole-built or metal-building garages. Every job starts with a site walk — we look at existing slab condition, subgrade, drainage into and out of the garage, tie-in to any adjacent slab or driveway apron, and what vehicles will actually park inside. That walk turns into a written spec: thickness, base depth, reinforcement, moisture barrier, slope, and threshold detail. You see the number and you see where it came from. No deposit, no assumptions, no scope drift after the pour.

Our Garage Floor Services

Garage floor concrete work covers several distinct situations, and each one changes the spec on thickness, base prep, reinforcement, and tie-in detail.

• New garage floor installation on new-construction attached or detached garages
• Complete garage floor replacement — demo, haul-away, subgrade rework, fresh pour
• Garage floor pours going into an existing pole-built or metal-building garage that was originally left as dirt or gravel
• Attached garage addition floors, including tie-in to the existing house footing at the shared wall
• Detached garage floors, either as part of a new build or as a slab going into a garage shell built by someone else
• Extension slabs — pushing a garage floor forward to add a workshop area, a bay, or a covered outdoor space
• Threshold and apron pours where the garage door meets the driveway, including thickened section under the door track
• Interior mechanical pads — furnace pads, water heater pads, tool cabinet bases inside the garage
• Repair and re-pour on failed garage slabs where cracks, settlement, or spalling are past the point overlay can fix

If the existing floor is spider-webbed, sunken at the door, or heaved from a support column, patching usually just delays the replacement. We'll walk the floor, tell you where you actually stand, and price both options so the comparison is honest.

Garage Floor Spec — Thickness, Base, Moisture Barrier

The spec on a residential garage floor is short but every line matters. This is the slab your daily driver rolls onto and the one motor oil finds first.

• Slab thickness — four inches is the residential minimum and the working default for standard passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks. Five to six inches is what we spec when the garage will see a floor lift, a fifth-wheel or RV parked inside, regular boat-trailer storage, or a full-size dually.
• Thickened section under a lift — where a two-post or four-post lift will bolt down, a thicker slab section (typically six to eight inches with heavier rebar) sized to the lift manufacturer's spec
• Compacted gravel base — four inches of number 57 stone over compacted subgrade is the working default. Deeper on soft clay, less on well-drained sand.
• Moisture barrier — six or ten mil polyethylene under the slab is standard on any residential garage. Skip it and the slab wicks ground moisture into everything stored inside year-round.
• Reinforcement — wire mesh is legitimate on a four-inch residential slab where the code allows it. Number-three or number-four rebar on twenty-four-inch centers is the upgrade for garages seeing heavier vehicles, lifts, or workshop use.
• Concrete strength — 3,500 to 4,000 psi standard, higher on garages seeing heavier loads
• Slope to drain — a small fall (one-eighth to one-quarter inch per foot) from the back wall out toward the garage door, so water off wet tires and melting snow leaves the garage instead of ponding at the back
• Floor drain option — a center drain tied to daylight or a French drain, common in workshop garages
• Thickened threshold at the garage door — where the door track lands and where tire load concentrates repeatedly
• Control joints saw-cut on the standard grid, laid out to avoid cutting through the walking path from the door to the interior

All of that appears on the spec sheet.